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The continuous and systematic analysis of performance data from the monitoring of operational PV power plants is vital to improving the management and thus profitability of those plants over their lifetime. The article draws on an extensive programme undertaken by 3E to assess the performance of a portfolio of European PV power plants it monitors. The article illustrates 3E’s approach to automatic fault detection. It will explore the various data mining methodologies used to gain an accurate understanding of the performance of large-scale PV systems and how that intelligence can be put to the best use for the optimal management of solar assets.

3E’s work on automatic fault detection and diagnosis has received funding from the European Union under the MANTIS project.

On October 24th Sirris organized an industrial seminar on the opportunities and challenges related to fleet-based data exploration. During this seminar, a general introduction to the MANTIS project was first given, followed by presentations from several partners within theMANTIS project including: the Mondragon University (press machines), the Eindhoven University of Technology (shaver manufacturing), 3E (Photovoltaic Plants), Ilias Solutions (Vehicles), Atlas Copco (compressors) and Sirris. The event was a real success with around 45 participants and offered participants via real-world use cases in the different industrial domains mentioned above the opportunity to see how data-driven analytics on a fleet of machines can optimize the operation and maintenance of those.

Tom Tourwe introduced the MANTIS project

Urko Zurutuza presented the Press Machine Maintenance Use-Case

If you would like to have further information on the outcomes of this seminar, please contact Caroline Mair (caroline.mair@sirris.be)

On October 24th Sirris is organizing in Belgium an industrial seminar on the opportunities and challenges related to fleet-based data exploration. During this event Belgian as well as other European industrial partners from the MANTIS project will present their experience with fleet-based analytics (based on use-cases from the MANTIS project).

Many companies operate a fleet of machines that have a similar, almost identical behaviour in terms of internal operation, application and usage, such as for example windmills, compressors and professional vehicles. This set of almost identical machines is defined as ‘a fleet’.

In addition, more and more, those machines are equipped with several (smart) sensors, that can capture data on operational temperature, vibrations, pressure and many other features, depending on the machine. In addition, the communication and data storage technologies are becoming ubiquitous, making it possible to gather the data in a central platform and derive insights into normal and anomalous behaviour across the entire fleet of machines. By comparing for example the behaviour of a single machine to the rest of the fleet, one can identify if a machine is underperforming due to misconfiguration or imminent failure. The analysis of this data can also help service and maintenance personnel to have a more detailed and optimised maintenance planning, e.g. ensuring an optimal distribution of the entire fleet in terms of remaining useful life, in order to manage the work load of the service engineers. Therefore, the exploitation of the data collected on a fleet of machines is a real asset for maintenance and service personnel and, at a larger scale, for an entire company.

You are interested in this event? Check out the event’s agenda and register here

Introduction

Off-Road and Special Purpose vehicles are used all over the world in various environmental conditions. They exist in all different kinds and formats and, within companies, a broad range of types of such vehicles will be in use.

Maintenance on these vehicles, be it preventive or corrective, can cause unavailability, having a negative impact on both productivity and efficiency. An overall objective regarding maintenance is to maximize the availability of the vehicles at the lowest maintenance cost. Therefore, a pro-active and preventive maintenance approach should lead to important savings, with higher availability.

The ILIAS approach

Most of these vehicles are already equipped with on-board HUMS systems/black boxes. The data generated by these on-board systems contain a broad range of information that can be used as input in a MANTIS-based platform in order to optimize the full maintenance strategy.

The diversity of HUMS systems, however, is very broad, even on the same type of vehicles. Each vehicle has its own configurations, interfaces, data formats, etc. Hence, there is a need to convert the collected data from various systems into a uniform and structured format in order to make them further exploitable.

This observation has led us to the conclusion that there are two viable approaches to building MANTIS-based platforms:

A per-vehicle type / HUMS system platform approach, aiming at an optimum maintenance strategy for a small number of equipment types.

An open platform approach that can be easily customized by the user to the type of vehicle/HUMS system(s) being used.

We opted for the second approach but have not limited it to the collection of data only but broadened it to a complete set of functionalities within the MANTIS-based platform.

Based on the experience and know-how gained from the collaboration within the MANTIS project and the architectural guidelines derived from it, ILIAS Solutions aims at building a platform that provides a complete solution from the readout of the black box until the optimization of the maintenance plans in an environment with high numbers of highly complex and mobile assets.

The ILIAS platform, therefore, provides users with an integrated set of user-friendly tools, permitting them to:

Import data from external sources like ERP systems, leading to a centralized data set. (Step 1)

Import raw data coming from any kind of HUMS system and cleanse them, based on automatic data wrangling, leading to state detection and health assessment. (Steps 2, 3, 4)

Make analysis of the data via different algorithms and translate them into rules/conditions to apply in the system. (Steps 5)

Define rules/conditions, including use and abuse rules, for triggering maintenance or other linked actions, based on the combined dataset. (Step 6)

Approve/disapprove the system-proposed maintenance actions and register them to make the system self-learning. (Steps 7, 8, 9)

This figure illustrates the approach.

MANTIS Approach proposed by ILIAS as a maintenance platform in Off-Road and Special Purpose vehivles

The figure below illustrates how we go through different steps in implementing the platform, following more iterations to improve the system.

ILIAS is running different steps in implementing the platform

Conclusion

For Off-Road and Special Purpose vehicles, the overall objective regarding maintenance is to maximize the availability of the vehicles at the lowest maintenance cost. Thus, a proactive and preventive maintenance approach leads to important savings, with higher availability.

ILIAS Solutions aims at building a platform that provides a complete solution from the readout of the black box until the optimization of the maintenance plans in an environment with high numbers of highly complex and mobile assets.

This platform should be an open platform that can be easily customized by the user to the type of vehicle/HUMS system(s) in use and where a number of rule sets/conditions are defined in a user-friendly way. This allows the system to trigger predictive maintenance actions. Analysis of broad data sets will lead to additional rules and conditions, optimizing the platform it selves.

In current global economy, manufacturers are under pressure to adapt to an ever-changing business environment. As a consequence, as part of Industry 4.0, new trends are gaining momentum, such as the servitization of manufacturing. The servitization can also be seen as a business model innovation of organization process and capabilities, where service-oriented activities increase. This leads in turn to revise the importance of certain strategies and technologies, such as reliability and life-cycle assessment, service engineering or advanced maintenance.

Previous to the MANTIS project, during last 3 years, T-REX project, funded under 7th framework factories of the future programme, has developed technologies oriented to the extension of machinery life-cycle, component re-use and servitization. Moreover, it has developed a framework and other support tools to facilitate new business opportunities to companies, in particular SMEs.

These activities are all contributing towards the development of Industry 4.0, in particular with respect to the extension of the manufacturing activities beyond the factory.

Ulma truck and screenshot of the trucks fleet Control panel at the BIEMH fair in Bilbao (June 2016)

As closure event for the T-Rex project in September 2016 IK4-TEKNIKER and ULMA are organizing a workshop which aims to demonstrate the feasibility of service-oriented business models, in particular for SMEs, and will include direct feedback from manufacturing companies interested in extending servitization and re-use activities. Part of these activities will take advantage of the results obtained in T-REX project.

Science and Technology BV (S[&]T) is a SME developing cutting edge technology for complex systems. The company has built track record in space industry and since several years it is applying its innovation knowledge in smart manufacturing. Examples are central use of predictive analytics for real-time optimization and automated event handling with intelligent database and self-learning algorithm enabling impact analysis and decision support.

Below are some examples of previous projects that helped build the knowledge base:

Decision Support Systems

Time is a scarce and expensive resource aboard challenging scientific environments such as the International Space Station (ISS). The training and preparation of astronauts for onboard missions can take up a large amount of this resource, as do the actual maintenance, operation and troubleshooting involved with such missions. ESA has been researching more efficient, effective, and easy ways to realize human operations. S[&]T works on the following projects: ETECA (Expert Tool to Enhance Crew Autonomy), MECA (Mission Execution Crew Assistant) and TIDE (Technology for Information, Decision and Execution superiority). These technologies form the basis of decision support development in MANTIS.

GUI of Mission Execution Crew Assistant

System Health Management

SHM optimizes operation of complex systems by analyzing their health using either model-based methods i.e., using online sensor data and knowledge of normative system behaviour, or data-driven techniques, i.e., system behaviour is learned and extracted from large data volumes. Typical functionality includes: fault detection, diagnosis of system failures, and prediction of system failures. S[&]T has been involved in: ESA’s Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP), the real-time multiple sensor array LOFAR, and the development of a health management system for a Reusable Space Transportation System.

Rocket propellant with graphical analysis of the system health managementRocket propellant with graphical analysis of the system health management

Aim of S[&]T is to further develop its digital factory tools in a modular way. In this way specific analysis- and decision-support solutions can be created, dedicated per client.

The book chapter “Internet of things Applications in Future Manufacturing” is part of the 2016 IERC-European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things book (Digitising the Industry – Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and Virtual Worlds). This book is published by “River Publishers Series in Communications” that is a series of comprehensive academic and professional books which focus on communication and network systems. The book chapter is the result of a collaboration between John Soldados (Athens Information Technology), Sergio Gusmeroli (Politecnico di Milano) and MANTIS partner: Pedro Malo and Giovanni Di Orio (UNINOVA). You can download the book chapter in the Dissemination section of the web as well as the entire book by using the following link:

Introduction — Future manufacturing is driven by a number of emerging requirements including:

The need for a shift from capacity to capability, which aims at increasing manufacturing flexibility towards responding to variable market demand and achieving high-levels of customer fulfillment.

Support for new production models, beyond mass production. Factories of the future prescribe a transition from conventional make-to-stock (MTS) to emerging make-to-order (MTO), configure-to-order (CTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO) production models. The support of these models can render manufacturers more demand driven. For example, such production models are a key prerequisite for supporting mass customization, as a means of increasing variety with only minimal increase in production costs.

A trend towards profitable proximity sourcing and production, which enables the development of modular products based on common plat- forms and configurable options. This trend requires also the adoption of hybrid production and sourcing strategies towards producing modular platforms centrally, based on the participation of suppliers, distributors and retailers. As part of this trend, stakeholders are able to tailor final products locally in order to better serve local customer demand.

Improved workforce engagement, through enabling people to remain at the heart of the future factory, while empowering them to take efficient decisions despite the ever-increasing operational complexity of future factories. Workforce engagement in the factories of the future is typically associated with higher levels of collaboration between workers within the same plant, but also across different plants.

The advent of future internet technologies, including cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), provides essential support to fulfilling these requirements and enhancing the efficiency and performance of factory processes. Indeed, nowadays manufacturers are increasingly deploying Future Internet (FI) technologies (such as cloud computing, IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the shop floor. These technologies are at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0) and enable a deeper meshing of virtual and physical machines, which could drive the transformation and the optimisation of the manufacturing value chain, including all touch-points from suppliers to customers. Furthermore, they enable the inter-connection of products, people, processes and infrastructures, towards more automated, intelligent and streamlined manufacturing processes. Future internet technologies are also gradually deployed in the shopfloor, as a means of transforming conventional centralized automation models (e.g., SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)) on powerful central servers) towards more decentralized models that provide flexibility in the deployment of advanced manufacturing technology.

The application of future internet technologies in general and of the IoT in particular, in the scope of future manufacturing, can be classified in two broad categories:

IoT-based factory automation, focusing on the decentralization of the factory automation pyramid towards facilitating the integration of new systems, including production stations and new technologies such as sensors, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and 3D printing. Such integration could greatly boost manufacturing quality and performance, while at the same time enabling increased responsiveness to external triggers and customer demands.

Within the above-mentioned categories of IoT deployments (i.e. IoT in the virtual manufacturing chains and IoT for factory automation), several IoT added-value applications can been supported. Prominent examples of such applications include connected supply chains that are responsive to customer demands, proactive maintenance of infrastructure based on preventive and condition-based monitoring, recycling, integration of bartering processes in virtual manufacturing chains, increased automation through interconnection of the shopfloor with the topfloor, as well as management and monitoring of critical assets. These applications can have tangible benefits on the competitiveness of manufacturers, through impacting production quality, time and cost. Nevertheless, deployments are still in their infancy for a number of reasons including:

Lack of track record and large scale pilots: Despite the proclaimed benefits of IoT deployments in manufacturing, there are still only a limited number of deployments. Hence manufacturers seek for tangible showcases, while solutions providers are trying to build track record and reputation.

Manufacturers’ reluctance: Manufacturers are rather conservative when it comes to adopting digital technology. This reluctance is intensified given that several past deployments of digital technologies (e.g. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Intelligent Agents) have failed to demonstrate tangible improvements in quality, time and cost at the same time.

Absence of a smooth migration path: Factories and production processes cannot change overnight. Manufacturers are therefore seeking for a smooth migration path from existing deployments to emerging future internet technologies based ones.

Technical and Technological challenges: A range of technical challenges still exist, including the lack of standards, the fact that security and privacy solutions are in their infancy, as well as the poor use of data analytics technologies. Emerging deployments and pilots are expected to demonstrate tangible improvements in these technological areas as a prerequisite step for moving them into production deployment.

In order to confront the above-listed challenges, IoT experts and manufacturers are still undertaking intensive R&D and standardization activities. Such research is undertaken within the IERC cluster, given that several topics dealt within the cluster are applicable to future factories. Moreover, the Alliance for IoT Innovation (AIOTI) has established a working group (WG) (namely WG11), which is dedicated to smart manufacturing based on IoT technologies. Likewise, a significant number of projects of the FP7 and H2020 programme have been dealing with the application and deployment of advanced IoT technologies for factory automation and virtual manufacturing chains. The rest of this chapter presents several of these initiatives in the form of IoT technologies and related applications. In particular, the chapter illustrates IoT technologies that can support virtual manufacturing chains and decentralized factory automation, including related future internet technologies such as edge/cloud computing and BigData analytics. Furthermore, characteristic IoT applications are presented. The various technologies and applications include work undertaken in recent FP7 and H2020 projects, including FP7 FITMAN, FP7 ProaSense, ECSELMANTIS, H2020 BeInCPPS, as well as the H2020 FAR-EDGE initiative. The chapter is structured as follows: The second section of the chapter following this introduction illustrates the role of IoT technologies in the scope of EU’s digital industry agenda with particular emphasis on the use of IoT platforms (includ- ing FITMAN and FIWARE) for virtual manufacturing. The third section is devoted to decentralized factory automation based on IoT technologies. A set of representative applications, including applications deployed in FP7 and H2020 projects are presented in the fourth section. Finally, the fifth section is the concluding one, which provides also directions for further research and experimentation, including ideas for large-scale pilots.

A large proportion of the costs of the European railway Infrastructure is related to maintenance and the current situation of railway maintenance .

The increasing usage of the railway infrastructure, due to a growing frequency of passenger and freight trains on it, and environmental and safety regulations, the increasing of maintenance requirements cannot be met without a substantial shift in maintenance strategies.

In this prospective, the new “Proactive/Predictive Maintenance” approach will involve/have an impact all the main railway stakeholder on long-term preservation of assets (expressed in RAMS requirements) minimizing life cycle costs, while for the railway operators, the proactive maintenance will improve the railway infrastructure availability and reliability.

Switches and Crossings (S&C) are fundamental infrastructure assets that allow efficient routing of trains on the network. Assessing their current status and ensuring their proper functionality is obviously a key requirement to guarantee the railway infrastructure availability for the railway operators. For these reasons, Ansaldo STS tries to discover in the Mantis project, references concerning railway S&C condition monitoring based on a wide range of methodologies from the world of statistics, data mining, time series analysis, machine learning, and filtering.

Given the examined literature, it seems clear that the use of the word “nowcasting” can be associated with: a shorter timeframe respect to “forecasting”, a different approach or algorithm for performing the estimation of the value of interest, the fact that the data used for the estimation is imprecise, uncertain, incomplete or is only indirectly related to the phenomenon of interest, and, finally, with the purpose of providing an alert for a sudden event or a possible anomaly.

A reasonable simple definition could be adopted in the framework of the Mantis project for differentiating “forecasting” and “nowcasting” processes:

Forecasting:

The process of exploiting past and present data to make deductions about the future.

Nowcasting:

The process of exploiting past and present uncertain or incomplete data to make deductions about the present.

Many of the failures are not detected until the asset is being operated by the interlocking system when trying to lock the train route. This means that for some failures, nowcasting cannot be done before operating the unit. Frequent test procedures could solve this issue but it has other disadvantages like the introduction of increased wear, cost and reduced inherit capacity. Another solution for this problem is to introduce additional condition monitoring systems for detection of different states of critical components in the S&Cs.

A key activity of the MANTIS WP4 work on analysis and decision making functionalities has focus on identification and development of methods for forecasting the remaining useful life of an asset by modelling it’s deterioration and by extrapolating this into the future. When the extrapolated deterioration reaches a certain threshold that marks the end-of-life of the asset, and that point in time can be used as the forecasted remaining useful life (RUL). Simultaneously, the extrapolated deterioration gives an indication of the expected wear and tear, which can be compared with the observed wearing out to monitor the behavior of an asset.

Based on the predicted remaining lifetime, suitable maintenance tasks can be planned, in order to prevent unscheduled system down time.

Overall working strategy

The approach followed by MANTIS to address the estimation challenge is as follows:

Develop algorithms and train models to estimate the RUL or predict the wear and tear of an asset.

Monitored data (from embedded sensors or from quality assurance checks) is streamed to the cloud based storage system, where it will be investigated using time-series analysis or temporal data mining approaches.

These methods will be used to discover revealing relationships between parameters to identify significant patterns, trends and anomalies.

Based on this analysis of the historical data, a diagnostic model will be made self-learning, comparing predicted and actual data.

Flexible modelling techniques will be used on diverse information, such as condition parameters, data patterns, sparse data and/or existing expertise to learn more complex relationships between the different parameters or train models which allow prediction of future performance in terms of expected failures.

Current status of work

An overview of relevant deterioration models and methods to estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) has been made. Also, for each use case, the present status with respect to available data, deterioration models and methods for estimation of RUL has been collected. In particular, for each of the use cases, the following information is relevant:

Description of data typically available

Description of relevant deterioration processes

Description of models used for estimation of RUL

Next steps

During the next 6 months, the general models and methods will be analysed and compared with the present status for the individual use case (available data, deterioration process, RUL estimation models). Following this analysis, specific models and methods will be selected and unified as much as possible, and thereafter applied and validated on the use cases during the second half of the MANTIS project.

Problem description

For analyzing maintenance problems, such as determining the root cause, in general three sources of information are available:

sensor data

machine generated logging messages

service and/or maintenance engineer reports

In contrast to sensor data and machine generated logging messages, of which the format is determined at design time, the service and maintenance reports have a free format, making it hard to analyze automatically.

Problem reporting

Possible solutions

Before going into possible solutions, a better description of the problem is needed. Free format is this case means that a report can contain

For easy analysis it would be good if it is possible to bring free text back into the predefined format realm. Ways to solve this are

using predefined forms with e.g. dropdown lists for selecting options

using intelligent text editors that can recognize the vocabulary needed for describing the specific problems

combinations of the above

less stringent is specifying rules people have to abide by when entering maintenance logs (typo’s are still possible then)

As it is impossible to predict all problems that will be encountered during the lifetime of a machine, there still needs to be the option to enter free text, but it should be clear that this is only to be used when other options do not cover the problem at hand.

Conclusion

It is clear that free text will always be used in reporting, but in order to facilitate data analysis of service and/or maintenance reports computer aid or rules can make life a lot easier.

This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 662189. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Austria, United Kingdom, Hungary, Slovenia, Germany.